Latest intelligence on the quite remarkably difficult gestation of IBM Corp’s Power Personal Systems comes in part from US PC Week, which reports that the machines will be launched in October – but without the humanlike interface that literally turned heads at the Comdex/Fall show last year. Only a portion of the talking head interface will appear initially, and it joins a growing list of features IBM has promised for the PowerPC systems but won’t deliver in the initial incarnation. The talking head is an on-screen face that talks, smiles, nods, and responds to spoken commands. The three PowerPC machines due next month are expected to include speech recognition, but other components in the interface will be phased in over the next year. As for operating systems, only AIX and Windows NT will be available this year. There will be models using the PowerPC 601 and 603 with prices starting at about $3,000, but they won’t run any faster than 90MHz Pentium machines already selling for less than $2,800 – indeed one user who has seen a 66MHz 601-based model sent out to a developer says that NT on the machine feels like Windows on a 50MHz 80486. The same source says the box is black and the cabinet and feel of the machine is decidedly cheap and unederwhelming. It comes with 16Mb standard expandable to 192Kb and external cache of 256Kb is also an extra. The CD-ROM drive is built in, and the machine has both AT and PCI interfaces. There is a 1Mb Standard graphics adaptor that does 16 colours in 1,280 by 1,024, and a Performance Graphics Adapter that has 4Mb video memory and can manage 256 colours at 1,280 by 1,024, but it is not clear that either of these is in the base price, and there seems to be no monitor in the base price. It has a 3.5 floppy and and a 270Mb drive, with larger options available. A microphone and a 2 Watt 2.5 loudspeaker are built in. Our source says that 32-bit applications would run fine under the IBM implementation of NT – the only problem being that there are no 32-bit applications for it. The 16-bit ones, such as Word and Excel, are expected to be rather sluggish.
